Martin Rhonheimer's Opinion on the Moral Evaluation of Human Conduct in Cases of Tubal Pregnancies and in Other Situations of Vital Conflict.

Abstract

Martin Rhonheimer claims that killing of a man is absolutely morally prohibited only when it is unfair, which is expressed by the moral teaching of the Catholic Church as the absolute prohibition of the direct killing of an innocent human being. However, there are certain cases of vital conflicts, such as ectopic pregnancy or tragic delivery when, because the baby is stuck in the birth canal, it is impossible to save the child. In these cases the death of the child, which is caused as a result of medical intervention, does not deprive the child of something, which otherwise it would not lose if the lethal act had not been performed. Therefore, an unjust act is not committed against the person, whose death one way or another, is inevitable in the case of vital conflict. However, remaining outside the order of justice, deadly intervention, in such cases, cannot be justified as a moral norm, but is justified through the exculpation of the agent, pointing to the lack of his moral responsibility for the killing, but not to the primary, intrinsic fairness of the act itself. In order to justify lethal solutions in vital conflicts M. Rhonheimer does not apply the principle of double effect, but he argues independently from this principle that such a solution is not an intrinsically evil act, therefore it satisfies the first condition of the principle of double effect, and enables its potential further application. Interventions that save life in the case of vital conflicts do not involve a preferential choice, which intentionally would ascribe greater value to the life of one person (e.g. mother) and would be directed against the life of another (e.g. child). Such an unjust weighing of different human existences is typical of the proportionalist method of moral evaluation of human acts rejected by the Magisterium. This kind of weighing is applied in cases of so-called "therapeutic abortion", when the mother"s life is saved at the expense of her child"s life, where if the abortion were not performed the child would survive and the mother would die as a result of deadly pathology. Rhonheimer claims that great challenge for contemporary moral theology is to overcome the harmful heritage of physicalism and, related to it, unjustified rigorism. Physicalism is an error which lies in the confusion of the moral order with the ontological order, as well as the confusion of the object of a moral act and the morally relevant causality with the physical characteristics and causality of natural  events.